Acting On Common Values Makes Change Possible

September 9, 2018 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

We don’t act on our values at work because we feel hopeless, that the odds are staked against us, that nothing we can do will matter. But are we right about that?

Resignation affects our paying jobs—how we retreat from our priorities in our workplaces—as well as the jobs we do in our communities (say, to support a local institution) or at home (as a caregiver). Since everyone else is only concerned about himself or herself, then maybe that’s all I should be worried about too. Am I right that my occasional impulses to be more open and generous are pipedreams that can never be realized?

A survey taken by the Common Cause organization in the UK in 2016 challenges both what we think about other peoples’ selfishness (as opposed to ther generosity) and the sense of resignation that quickly follows in us. The accompanying report also discusses how we decide on what we value more and value less. It’s not just the convictions that we’re born with. Our priorities are also influenced by what we think other people and the social institutions that we identify with value. It works in the other direction too, with our values and how we demonstrate them influencing these others too. Our values take form and get applied because of a complex back-and-forth.

Think of it as a three-way conversation. But you need to participate in that conversation to have an influence, and Common Cause discovered that your influence is probably far greater than you think it is.

Common Cause UK initiated the survey because, as an organization, it was concerned about the lack of public support for social and environmental changes it was seeking. Its leaders understood that values drive change and wanted a better understanding than it had already about citizen priorities. Those conducting the survey were surprised enough by the amount of common ground they discovered that they went on to propose ways that individuals and organizations (including businesses, non-profits and governments) can begin to overcome the current gridlock.

Here is a link to the survey report (“the Survey”), which I think you’ll find as interesting as I did.

This is the question I brought to it: Is where you “make a living,” try to make a difference in your community and create a better life at home primarily about your “selfish values” or is your work really driven by far more generous impulses? What the Survey shows–in a one-two punch–is how acting on the so-callled “compassionate values” that play a lead role for most of us is likely to be far more consequential than you know.

We Have More Common Ground Than We Think

The Survey defines “selfish values” as wealth, social recognition, social status, prestige, control over others, authority, conformity, preserving public image, popularity, influencing others and ambition. It defines “compassionate” values as broadmindedness, a world of beauty or at peace, equality, protecting the environment, social justice, helpfulness, forgiveness, honesty and responsibility.

The Survey found that nearly 75% of participants placed greater importance on compassionate values–with Survey protocols correcting for the bias that participants were seeking to cast themselves in a better light by downplaying the importance they attach to selfish values. Even more striking was the Survey’s finding that 77% of participants believed that other people were primarily driven by selfish values. The truth is that a large majority of people (three-quarters of the population) believe that their generous motivations are more important and drive them far more often than their selfish ones.

Because people always influence one another when it comes to values, and the priorities of social institutions are shaped in a similar conversation, the Survey’s authors make several recommendations to activate our generous commitments, including these.

Since people are discouraged from declaring their priorities when they believe that most other people disagree with them, accurate information—like that provided here—will not only counter pessimism but also fuel optimism. When it comes to your values, what other people value matter almost as much as what you value “in your heart of hearts”. But it goes beyond your optimism or pessimism. In the course of our work, we can probe other people’s motivations (instead of assuming them) to strengthen our social connections, while also finding enough courage in “the strength of our numbers” to act more generously.

The consequence for you and for others is similar to when you voice your dissent in a group, a back-and-forth exchange that was discussed here a couple of months ago. When you speak from your convictions and are clear about the changes you seek, it enables others to clarify their commitments, even when they’re different from yours, and for the group to move forward. Acting on your commitments also conveys your beliefs about how social institutions (from community groups to the federal government) should operate.

The entire time that our values are at stake, we’re watching and subtly influencing one another, so it’s important to read the social landscape around us correctly. The Survey’s writers ask:

How is a person’s perception of others’ values shaped? A person’s perceptions will be influenced by both what fellow citizens say is important to them and what he or she infers about fellow citizens from the way that they behave.

For this reason, it is very significant if people don’t always bear testimony to the values that they hold to be most important – either in what they say, or what they do…[P]eople often speak and act as though they attach particular importance to values that are actually relatively unimportant to them.

In other words, co-workers, neighbors and even family members may only seem to be acting selfishly. To discover their generous impulses, you may need to watch them more closely or simply ask what drives them in the work that they do.

Your actions and others’s actions speak louder than words to social institutions too. An institution like the US Supreme Court is always “noticing” how the American people are expressing themselves as decision-makers, voters and consumers. Because the men and women who guide these institutions are influenced by the public’s values, our acting generously impacts institutional commitments as well.

Our Commonality Goes Deeper Than Our Political Divides

In America today, it may seem like politics mirrors the debate between generous and selfish values, but it doesn’t.

While Common Cause’s objectives in conducting the Survey were to advance liberal-sounding social and environmental objectives, this Survey isn’t about the liberal versus conservative divide in either the UK or in America, even though one of the Survey’s compassionate values (“social justice”) may have political connotations here that it lacks in Britain. The polarity that the Survey identifies between compassionate and selfish values is different than the struggle between political left and political right.

The Survey’s results plumb something that goes deeper than the “political values” in those debates. That’s because “political values” both here and across the Atlantic are little more than buzzwords aimed at mobilizing one’s political base: red flags like “global warming,” “taxes,” “abortion” and “diversity” that have a high emotional charge but little if any ethical content on the political surface. When you plumb beneath the surface however, most conservatives as well as most liberals are committed to the health of the planet, to paying for our social institutions, to the quality of every person’s life, and to the inherent worth of people who are different from them. Three quarters of us!

Why not start with the values that unite us rather than the buzzwords that divide us?

Consistent with the Survey’s findings about compassionate and selfish values, most peoples’ convictions extend far deeper than will ever be apparent during bouts of political gamesmanship. Moreover, those on their “political sides” are often voting, marching and lobbying for the lesser of two evils (as in the last American election), which further obscures their true convictions. Even when the ethical imperatives that drive a block of voters are reasonably well-known, too little time and effort has gone into identifying the common ground that could unite them with those “on the other side” and break the current gridlock.

In this regard, the Survey provides a glimpse into the majority’s convictions when asked about two key values that are prime motivators for tackling our problems today. A broad-based preference for generous over selfish values provides at least some of the foundation for a collective way forward—and all of us would be seizing an opportunity by taking it. Given the Survey’s findings, the influence that your actions will have on others and on our institutions will likely be considerable and certainly more than you currently think if you’re as misguided as the Survey participants about the selfishness driving others.

Rebecca Solnit whose “Hope in the Dark” was a topic here last week provides a surprising postscript to this argument in her book. Above all, Solnit values grassroots solutions to problems over ideology-driven policies imposed from above. It’s a propensity that has made her flexible when it comes to finding common ground for her activism. In other words, she’s had to go deeper. As Solnit observes:

I’ve often wondered what alliances and affinities might arise without those badges of right and left. For example, the recent American militia movements were patriarchal, nostalgic, nationalistic, gun-happy and full of weird fantasies about the UN, but they had something in common with us: they prized the local and feared its erasure by the transnational. The guys drilling with guns might have been too weird to be our allies, but they were just the frothy foam on a big wave of alienation, suspicion and fear from people watching their livelihoods and their communities go down the tubes. What could have happened if we could have spoken directly to the people in that wave, if we could have found common ground, if we could have made our position neither right nor left but truly grassroots? What would have happened if we had given them an alternate version of how local power was being sapped, by whom, and what they might do about it? We need them, we need a broad base, we need a style that speaks to far more people than the left has lately been able to speak to and for.

The value that could have driven this unity was the protection of livelihoods and communities (a compassionate value) rather than sacrificing them on the altar of globalism and trade (an ultimately selfish one).

Solnit’s desire for environmentalists and ranchers in the American West to make common cause is similarly astute. Again, she attacks top-down ideological convictions that will never succeed because they always seem to miss the human costs at ground level.

Environmentalists had worked with a purist paradigm of untouched versus ravaged nature. Working with ranchers opened up a middle way [for her], one in which categories were porous, humans have a place in the landscape—in working landscapes and not just white-collar vacation landscapes—and activism isn’t necessarily oppositional.

This time, the common ground that Solnit saw was how environmentalists and ranchers both love and depend on the land, how each cherish different things about it, and how neither wants to harm it (another compassionate value) while the other side’s interest in the land is largely motivated by how much can be taken from it (a selfish one).

One day, the generous values we hold in common will help us to solve the problems that confront us. I’d argue that we should start acting on our generosity today.

Note: This post was adapted from my September 9, 2018 newsletter

Good Work’s Foundations

September 2, 2018 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

I saw rooms full of models of imagined buildings and cities at the Museum of Modern Art in New York this week. The artist was Bodys Isek Kingelez from central Africa. Pictured above is one of his futuristic building models. They reflect “dreams for his country,” known during his life as the Belgian Congo and later as Zaire. Kingelez said he was envisioning “a more harmonious society” than he saw around him.

Artists are sometimes better at envisioning than the rest of us. It can be even harder for us to bring a better future into our day-to-day work—but when we do, our hopes pull us forward, particularly as we struggle to realize them.

Acting on what we hope for is one of good work’s foundations. So are acting out of our aim for both generosity and autonomy on the job. I’ve been thinking about demonstrations of generosity, autonomy and acting on hope this week from teacher/writer Roxanne Gay, actor/rap artist/omnivore Riz Ahmed, and activist/public intellectual Rebecca Solnit, respectively—3 powerful voices with a lot to say about how we spend our time and talent every day.

Generous Judgment

Generosity is about acknowledging the autonomy or self-determination of others (like co-workers, clients/customers, suppliers, members of your business and non-profit communities) in the course of your work.

You probably know comic Louis C.K. Highly acclaimed, his semi-autobiographical cable TV show Louis and stand-up comedy specials have won 6 Emmy awards, a Peabody, and star-struck interviews at places like Fresh Air. To me, his comedy seemed deep, subtle, smart, and self-aware. Until late last year, when he was “outed” by several women who worked with him, it seemed that Louis C.K. could do no wrong. They accused him of pretty egregious conduct that reminded me of apocryphal stories I used to hear about neighborhood “flashers,” only this time much worse, because he was not the sicko stranger in a trench coat. Instead, several in his reluctant audience had tied their careers to his.

As the story came out (on the heels of Harvey Weinstein, Kevin Spacey, Charlie Rose and others), I was surprised by the “not enough” of his public reactions and the suggestions around them that he had previously tried to bully his accusers into silence. Well this week, less than a year after the revelations first surfaced, Louis C.K. returned to a thunderous reaction “on the come-back trail.” The crowd that felt lucky enough to be at a NYC comedy club for his unannounced performance was reportedly ecstatic.

Clearly, Louis C.K. didn’t know how to handle the “world of hurt” around his abusive conduct when it first came out and was similarly clueless when he concluded “that all had been forgotten” and “it is time for everybody to just move on.” In a New York minute, Roxanne Gay told him otherwise.

It might have been easier for Louis if his comeuppance hadn’t been in the New York Times. But she didn’t just excoriate him. She met him like she acknowledged his intelligence, his talent, his fans who might still learn from what she was about to say. Instead of writing him off as a perverted loser, Gay told him what he (along with others who don’t know but need to hear) what should be done by adults who behave this way. It was a gift he may not have deserved, but it was a judgment that was elevated by the light that she brought to it.

“If Louis C.K. doesn’t know what to do when he’s caused this kind of damage, then I’ll try to explain it,” she seems to say—so he can make it right this time, and others like him can learn what they need to do too. Anger followed by patience in that New York minute was an act of generosity. Indeed, it’s a balance that elevates nearly everything that Roxanne Gay does.

While you should read her entire commentary, this is Gay on Louis C.K.’s “comeback road”:

How long should a man like Louis C.K. pay for what he did? At least as long as he worked to silence the women he assaulted and at least as long as he allowed them to doubt themselves and suffer in the wake of his predation and at least as long as the comedy world protected him even though there were very loud whispers about his behavior for decades.

He should pay until he demonstrates some measure of understanding of what he has done wrong and the extent of the harm he has caused. He should attempt to financially compensate his victims for all the work they did not get to do because of his efforts to silence them. He should facilitate their getting the professional opportunities they should have been able to take advantage of all these years. He should finance their mental health care as long as they may need it. He should donate to nonprofit organizations that work with sexual harassment and assault victims. He should publicly admit what he did and why it was wrong without excuses and legalese and deflection. Every perpetrator of sexual harassment and violence should follow suit.

Moral condemnation is easy but describing the “road someone needs to take back” requires a comprehension of the pain that was caused, the actions that would be necessary to alleviate it, as well as the belief that he could act on your advice. Most judgments fail to include these components, but Gay’s has all of them.

The Christian lesson of the crucifixion is infinitely more powerful because it is followed by the resurrection. We’re expert at crucifying people today—at work, and otherwise—but too often seem to be unconcerned about their ability (and ours) to rise afterwards. It’s not about forgiveness but the hard-won path to change.

The last time I wrote about Roxanne Gay on this page was in January.

Creative Autonomy

Autonomy is actively making the most out of what you have, identifying what is important to you, and putting yourself on the line to achieve it. Autonomy is self-determination.

In the limited series The Night Of (on HBO), Riz Ahmed played two roles: the role of a Pakistani student wrongly imprisoned at Riker’s Island for murder and a role beneath his acting that involved you as a viewer in a separate dialogue. You could feel Ahmed’s intelligence, focus and humanity whispering through his role—his interior life giving the 6 episodes counterpoints beyond the writing, directing and acting. (“Whatever he was saying and doing, he was always simultaneously maintaining a second conversation with you about what both of you might be thinking.”)

A profile with that line and additional suggestions about Ahmed’s perspective was this week’s cover story in the New York Times Magazine. You can sense what’s unique about him from the first impressions that Ahmed made on his profiler about his jobs as an actor and musician, pathfinder, role-model and activist.

It’s not that he doesn’t get animated. He does. Talking with Ahmed can be a little like sparring, a little like co-writing a constitution, a little like saving the world in an 11th-hour meeting. He interrupts, then apologizes for interrupting, then interrupts again. He can deliver entirely publishable essays off the top of his head. He pounds the table when talking about global injustices, goes back to edit his sentences minutes after they were spoken, challenges the premises of your sentences before you’re halfway through speaking. This is what happens when you cut your teeth on both prep-school debate teams and late-night freestyle rap battles, as Ahmed has. He is like someone who wants to speak truth to power but now is power — famous enough, at least, to have people listen to his ideas. He is like someone very smart who also cares a lot. He is like someone who doesn’t want to be misunderstood.

Not surprisingly, much of Ahmed’s edge comes from being a Pakistani-Brit, rising from one competitive lower school to another. Along the way, he felt his separateness as a South Asian but always “believed that the flag of Britain should and would obviously include him.” That is, until Al Qaeda’s attack on Twin Towers, which happened the month he matriculated to university and made it even more burdensome to be a Muslim. It was there that he made a critical life choice.

[H]e found himself at Oxford University, just after 9/11 — a brown kid surrounded by the acolytes of seemingly ancient white wealth, who sometimes did have a way of talking to him as if he were a shopkeeper. Rather than retreating into Oxford, he decided to make Oxford come to him. He started organizing parties that celebrated his music and cultural touchstones, parties where he would get on the mic over drum ’n’ bass records. Soon enough, the event he co-founded, “Hit and Run,” moved to Manchester and became one of the city’s leading underground music events.

What could have been angry rejection and a retreat to the company of other South Asian Muslims instead became his invitation for Oxford to join a broader conversation that he was sponsoring. It was a place where he mashed up Pakistani melodies and rhythms with British rap (just as rap was rising to become the most popular music in the world.) As Lena Dunham observed about him, he combined the bravado of someone in the hip-hop world with the intensity of someone who’s mounted a barricade.

Creating this platform was a singular act of personal autonomy (as well as generosity towards others) that has informed Riz Ahmed’s work ever since. He wants to initiate a conversation that’s big enough for him and for everyone else. It’s a theme that shines through every corner of his remarkable story. I hope that you’ll enjoy digging into more of it.

Living Your Vision

Envisioning is living the future that you hope for through your work.

I read Rebecca Solnit’s “Hope in the Dark” traveling to and from New York City. In a nutshell, it’s about living what’s important to you, even though there is no assurance or even likelihood that the better world you’re working for will get any closer as a result. As her title says, it’s hope in the dark.

Americans in particular tend to want more certainty than that. We’re not accustomed to a continuous struggle for a better world or trying to “live our hopes”–particularly when they may never be realized–every day. Instead, we tend to respond to a crisis/problem/challenge, declare victory or defeat, and go home to wait for the next one to demand our attention. Our responses are generally to emergencies that interrupt the normal flow of our lives. We don’t tend to see struggling for what’s important to us as a daily commitment.

Solnit argues that treating struggles for justice, fairness, freedom, for greater opportunity, self-determination or a healthier planet as isolated emergencies results in abandoning our victories while they’re still vulnerable and conceding our defeats too quickly. When we’re committed to achieving what’s truly important to us, Solnit argues: “It is always too soon to go home.”

She illustrates her point by recounting a story she wrote several years back about pay equity for women:

[A] cranky guy wrote in that women used to make sixty-two cents to the male dollar and now we made seventy-seven cents, so what were we complaining about? It doesn’t seem like it should be so complicated to acknowledge that seventy-seven cents is better than sixty-six cents and that seventy-seven cents isn’t good enough, but the politics we have is so pathetically bipolar that we only tell this story two ways: either seventy-seven cents is a victory, and victories are points where you shut up and stop fighting; or seventy-seven cents is ugly, so activism accomplishes nothing and what’s the pint of fighting? Both versions are defeatist because they are static. What’s missing from these two ways of telling is an ability to recognize a situation in which you are traveling and have not arrived, in which you have cause both to celebrate and to fight, in which the world is always being made and is never finished. (italics mine)

It is because the struggle is never easy and never done that Solnit quotes the poet John Keats, who called the world with all of its suffering “this vale of soul-making.” While “Hope in the Dark” is mainly Solnit’s call to continuous political activism, her arguments apply equally to declaring what’s important to you though the work that you do, that is, to any kind of acting on your convictions. To borrow the force of her argument, your jobs become “toolboxes to change things,” places “to take up residence and live according to your beliefs,” and, as Keats would say, “vales” where your soul is made because it is where a sense of meaning, purpose and wholeness (as opposed to partial victories or defeats) can be found.

If you’re unfamiliar with Rebecca Solnit, “Hope in the Dark”‘s 100-odd pages would be a splendid introduction. Her “A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise In Disaster” such as 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina is a beautiful argument that we’re far more and far better than we often think that we are.

Note: This post was adapted from my September 2, 2018 newsletter

Blockchain Goes To Work

August 26, 2018 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

Technology can change the quality of your work for the better—but first you need to recognize it’s possibilities.

Over the past year, I’ve noticed that most people seem to glaze over when I start talking about blockchain, a web-based technology that’s already been demonstrating its potential. It’s not that people are gun-shy about technology. (15 years ago almost none of us were taking portable supercomputers everywhere that we went.) So maybe its because we haven’t needed to master blockchain’s learning curve—gentle though it might be. It’s like the CRISPR gene-splicing tool. We’ve heard that it’s groundbreaking, but have never had enough of a reason to understand why.

The case for understanding blockchain today is strong and getting stronger. It not only holds the potential to transform everything from the banking system (via digital currencies) to the pursuit of social justice (more below), but also the ways that we work everyday. In a future where more of our jobs will be automated or performed more cheaply elsewhere, spending 8 hours a day in an office, lab, classroom, clinic or factory will be the exception rather than the rule. Most of us won’t stop working, we’ll just work differently and, in all likelihood, blockchain technology will be one of the innovations that enable us to do so.

A blockchain is a web-based chain of connections, most often with no central monitor, regulator or editor. Its software applications enable every node in its web of connections to record data which can then be seen and reviewed by every other connection. It maintains its accuracy through this transparency. Everyone with access can see what every other connection has recorded in what amounts to a digital ledger.

Let’s assume that the blockchain involves the buying and selling of Mackintosh apples. Let’s also assume the apples are of equal freshness and quality and that transportation costs will be handled separately. If you’re interested in buying or selling Mackintosh apples, a blockchain digital ledger could allow you to see the prices and quantities in every other transaction on that ledger before you do your own buying or selling. Because this information is already available to you, there is no need for a “middleman” to access it, establish the trading rules or be entitled to a piece of the action. Once buyers or sellers have entered their transaction on the digital ledger, everyone can see it and no one else in the blockchain can change it.

Blockchain-based software can be launched by individuals, organizations or even governments. Software access can be limited to a closed network of participants or open to everyone. A blockchain is usually established to overcome the need for and cost of a “middleman” (like a bank) or some other impediment (like currency regulations, tariffs or burdensome bureaucracy). It promotes “the freer flow” of legal as well as illegal goods, services and information. Blockchain is already driving both modernization and globalization. Over the next several years, it will also have profound impacts on us as individuals.

A year ago, the MIT Technology Review published a two-minute video explanation of this technology called Blockchain Decoded. If you’re still puzzled, this short video can also help you to visualize it.

What Is Blockchain’s Transformative Power?

Before turning to its likely impacts on our work, it helps to understand why blockchain technology has moved to the forefront of many of our on-line interactions today. Christopher Mims, who writes on technology for the Wall Street Journal, gave three reasons for why blockchain is already transforming business models in a column that he wrote a few months back.

First, it’s genuinely well-suited to transactions that require trust and a permanent record [such as business contracts]. Second, blockchain typically requires the cooperation of many different parties [making it suitable to complex customer and supplier networks]. The third reason is [the] hype [that bitcoin has received.] The excitement around cryptocurrency gives blockchain the visibility to attract developers and encourage adaptation.

In other words, because of the fanfare around digital currencies like bitcoin, blockchain technology is rapidly developing its own “ecosystem” of applications in the marketplace.

Some of the lowest hanging fruit has been in the area of supply chain logistics. Mims reports that companies like retailer Walmart and shipping company Maersk are already using blockchain technology to track grocery items and the movement of shipping containers over transportation networks. Companies like Kroger, Nestle, Tyson Foods and Unilever are also using it to monitor the flow of consumer products. Every point in the supply chain logs into a dedicated blockchain “node” to provide source, condition and location information that makes it easier to estimate times of arrival or to identify where goods were damaged.

Mim’s also speaks to blockchain’s longer-term significance, noting “that the most seemingly mundane applications of blockchain could lead to the biggest and most concrete changes in all of our lives.” He continues:

It’s too early to say whether blockchain, as both a technology and a movement, has the power to overcome issues that thwarted generations of software engineers. The most justifiable skepticism is that blockchain is incremental rather than revolutionary. In some cases, it isn’t much more than a marketing term imposed on systems that hardly differ from existing databases….

But if it works, it has the potential to be a fundamental enabling technology, the way new standards for transmitting data across networks led to the internet. More concretely, it could someday underlie everything from how we vote, to who we connect with on line, to what we buy. (emphasis added)

Some Of The Spotlight on Blockchain Comes From Bitcoin

I watched an entertaining and informative documentary this week called The Rise and Rise of Bitcoin. Bitcoin is a blockchain-based digital currency that can be used outside of the formal banking system. Here is a link to the documentary’s trailer and what an L.A Times reviewer said about it after its release in 2014:

Tracing the bitcoin to 2009, when a shadowy figure with the moniker Satoshi Nakamoto first floated the open source, peer-to-peer concept of “global decentralized money,” the documentary follows a community of tech geeks who were among the early adopters.They were soon joined by a parade of high-rolling speculators, libertarians and black market dealers who were all attracted to the notion of a currency that wasn’t tied to the institutional banking system or personal identity.

Inevitably the federal regulators caught up (one of the film’s subjects notes that historically, regulation evolves slower than innovation) and crackdowns and subpoenas followed. As a result, several of those featured bitcoin millionaires are later shown filing for bankruptcy or, in the case of Charlie Shrem, former chief executive of the early bitcoin exchange BitInstant, being arrested. (Last month he pleaded guilty to aiding and abetting the operation of an unlicensed money transmitting business.)

Despite subsequent damage inflicted by hackers and scammers, the bitcoin (currently hovering around $380 to $385) endures.

It’s worth noting that while a single bitcoin had no value in the marketplace a decade ago, the price for one last Friday (8/24/18) was $6,510–so bitcoin both endures and continues to prosper.

I recommend The Rise and Rise of Bitcoin because it’s a rollercoaster of a story and the sensation around the currency itself has driven interest in the blockchain that enables it. Bitcoin’s evolution is also about familiar themes on this page: entrepreneurship, navigating a “whitewater world” of rapid and confounding change in the workplace, and the risk/reward of leaving the security of what you know for the uncertain rewards that might lie over the next hill. This documentary throbs with that kind of adventure.

Blockchain Supports The Pursuit of Social Justice

Last fall, I talked here about the use of blockchain technology to simplify the recording of land titles. Enabling an activity that many of us take for granted is particularly important in developing countries where there can be significant bureaucratic and logistical hurdles to recording property deeds and transfers, particularly for people living outside of the largest cities. Without the ability to establish their ownership of land and of the improvements they have made to their land, poor people often find it impossible to escape from poverty by using “clear title” in their property to secure credit. A blockchain application established by Hernando de Soto and the Institute for Liberty and Democracy is dedicated to streamlining that process for whoever has online access in places like rural South America.

Other blockchain-based applications have recently been developed to store data from multiple, individual sources about atrocities that are being perpetrated in Syria by the Assad regime. For years, activists as well as average citizens have been attempting to document violence by taking photographs and videos as it’s happening with their cell-phones. Failing to record such violence in an accurate manner has consequences. For example, if the brutal chemical attacks against civilians in 2013 and 2017 can’t be documented reliably, it becomes easier for the regime to deny that they happened and for those running Assad’s war machine to escape accountablity. An executive at Truepic, a leading image authentication platform, wrote an article about local civic groups and international organizations like the Syrian American Medical Society that are using blockchain-based software programs to create a visual record of these atrocities that can easily be accessed and can’t be tampered with by anyone after the record has been uploaded.

Technological advances now make it possible to disseminate images and videos around the world in seconds. Journalists and observers can send authenticated, encrypted digital media over local cellular networks or high-speed internet connections. Device sensor data can verify precisely where a photo or video was taken, and the blockchain can ensure its integrity in perpetuity.

For readers whose non-profit work is dedicated to improving access and quality in education, health care, the environment, civic engagement—in fact, nearly anywhere involving diverse client connections—blockchain technology may open up new ways of tackling the problems you’re facing and improving the communities that you serve.

Blockchain Can Pay You For New Increments Of Your Work

All of the jobs that we do include providing products and services that are valuable to others but are difficult to put a price on and impossible to get paid for. Wouldn’t it be great if we could get paid for time and talent that we’re currently giving away for free?

For example I’m reminded of Steemit, a social network profiled here last October.

One of my regular complaints is that most of us are providing social media platforms with our time (the hours we spend liking, commenting, reading, and re-tweeting), our content (photos, videos, tweets, posts, articles and newsletters like this one) and our personal information (about what we watch and buy, about our friends, where we are, what we look like)—FREE OF CHARGE for the privilege of using Facebook or Twitter. We’re providing similar reams of free information about our interests and buying habits by using Google and Amazon.

There’s no question that the information we’re providing has value to these companies and that they’re making billions of dollars by selling our data to advertisers and others who are tracking our behavior. There is also no available way for us to get paid for providing these companies with our time and information.

Steemit’s social network is based on a different business model. It uses its own blockchain-based exchange to pay its users with a digital currency called Steem that can be redeemed in hard currency for your time, content and influence. In other words, you are compensated for small as well as large amounts of engagement and output. For its part, Steemit doesn’t monetize its platform with advertisements. Instead, its revenues come from users investing to promote their content and “earn more” from it. Over time, the digital currency that’s owned by the company also appreciates in value.

I learned about Steemit from a Wired article written by Andrew McMillan and wrote the following at the time:

Those who are active on the [Steemit] network are funding jobs like taking pictures for travel blogs as they wander around the world and their gigs as free-lance writers…

“The more people who like your post, the more you like other people’s posts, the quicker you spot a post that later becomes popular, that is, the more that you contribute to “the human hivemind” on Steemit, the more “money” you can make. McMillen estimates that at least one early-and-often user has accumulated more than a million dollars worth of Steem. In other words, people already have paying jobs on Steemit’s social network. And ‘Steem is the first cryptocurrency that attempts to accurately and transparently reward…[the] individuals who make subjective contributions to its community.’

As Steemit demonstrates, blockchain-based exchanges have already been built that pay individuals for their formerly uncompensated time and effort.

You might recall another October newsletter profiling Balaji Srinivasan, who predicted that blockchain-based digital currency exchanges will change how everyone does business while facilitating payment for every kind of product/service that has value to somebody else and is in limited supply. For him, blockchain is:

a programmable way to value every scarce resource (including, say, your availability to take a 5 minute survey that is sent to you by a marketer), and pay you for that scarce resource (namely, the 5 minutes that you would never have made available if you weren’t being paid for it). Time. Talent. 5-minute tasks. Listening to a lonely stranger [who’s willing to pay for your company]….

Think of it. Everything of value that is in limited supply today can become a commodity for sale in countless jobs–both small and large–because programmers have created an on-line exchange …that can handle each sale and get you paid for it in digital currency without the need for either banks or money as we know it. Compensation simply goes into your digital account.

Moreover, the marketplace could be global. Everyone in the world who has access to the digital ledger in a particular blockchain application would be able to buy and sell their work product. Such a marketplace would be bigger than Amazon’s without the need (or costs) of a company middle-man.

This work-to-benefit exchange, as I’ll call it, hasn’t been built yet, let alone populated by enough “buyers” and “sellers of work” to make the exchange itself and its valuation mechanisms viable, but rest assured, explorers like Balaji Srinivasan are already working through the details.

As 9-5 jobs increasingly disappear, there will be new ways to work and get paid for it. You will still need your talent, skill and vision, marketing, stamina and hustle, but in our lifetimes it will likely be possible “to make a living” in a marketplace where you (along with billions of others) each have a node in a global blockchain. Some people will still work in small and large groups and companies won’t disappear, but some of the void that has been left when traditional workplaces disappear will almost certainly be filled by these kinds of on-line, work-to-benefit exchanges.

Parting Thoughts

Blockchain is a story that won’t be going away, and I’ll continue to cover it as the technology evolves to support the good work that we’re trying to do.

Over the past several months there has been an animated discussion about artificial intelliigence (AI) technologies (that will replace us in the workplace) and intelligence augmentation (IA) technologies (that will make us more productive). Blockchain is an IA technology. It is expanding rather than limiting the ways that we can make a living.

And that’s a cause for hope.

Note: This post was adapted from my August 26, 2018 newsletter.